American Philosophy, A Love Story

                                                                                                                       https://www.npr.org/2016/10/11/497085674/a-neglected-library-leads-to-love-in-american-philosophy

It is indeed a "love story", and not only a metaphorical one -- which will likely make it much more accessible to some readers. It is also the true story of a philosopher falling into "book heaven" in the White Mountains in the form of the abandoned library of William Ernest Hocking. Having gotten engaged on a rock in a mountain stream in the White Mountains, there was a an emotional connection for me. 

While I am an inveterate page tabber, there were only two in this book -- it turned out to be more recreational than serious. 

My summary of the philosophy of James is that -- "We the Pragmatists believe it is no longer possible to accept the transcendent after Darwin, but find the fact of a meaningless life based on the random effects of materials sloshing around completely undirected to be existentially so depressing as to to make suicide the only viable option. However, that prospect doesn't seen so grand either, so we have decided to muddle on -- perhaps beauty, perhaps love, perhaps mere stiff upper lip determination will suffice for us to carry on to the inevitable annihilation of death. We live in the hope that something will turn up!" 

Kaag seems to have gone somewhat on the path of Charles Sanders Peirce, likely with "love" being the breakthrough vs a "religious experience". 

p154, 

"and he (Pierce) never tells us what happened in his religious experience at St Thomas's or exactly what his communion with the Absolute was like. All he tells us is that he was radically, irreversibly changed: "I have never been a mystic before, but now I am". 

On and around page 226, "it wasn't some deus ex machina that would save me from my situation". 

"deus ex machina", "God from the machine" a term typically associated with film or writing, where "all of a sudden", something completely unexpected shows up and saves the day.

Shortly after he quotes Plato "Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophical thought has done it's best, the wonder remains".  

A less brilliant thinker than your typical philosopher might just substitute God for "wonder", and say something like "The fear [knowledge, respect. ...] of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom" (Proverbs 9:10)

A more current thinker might say that after Heisenberg, CRISPR, and other genetic and physics discoveries, Darwin is dead, so we are back to God and "wonder". 

Naturally, modern man is REALLY driven to reject the God hypothesis, no longer because he not only "has no need for it" (Laplace), he can't possibly allow it, because it would force him to reconsider his worship of self and pleasure, and THAT is something he simply can't countenance! 

The book is an entertaining read, and Kaag has an easy style. Hey, "William James" and "Pragmatism" sound more impressive than "a shallow cotton candy romance novel", so many moderns will love it. It also makes adultery into a courageous, morally imperative life growth event -- so there is that! 

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds (How William James Can Save Your Life)

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/books/review/sick-souls-healthy-minds-william-james-john-kaag.html

The NYT review is adequate. What strikes me about this book and the other Kaag book I've read recently is the great length that thinkers at the end of the 19th century were going to in order to try their best to survive in a world where they firmly believed that intellectuals were required to believe there was no God -- or eternity. As the title indicates, they were still somewhat desperately clinging to the idea of a "soul". 

Perhaps the reason James remains beloved by so many readers more than a century after his death is that his pragmatism often shaded into self-help. He believed in the power of positive thinking, in bucking up; he counseled action, and not just philosophizing, in the face of uncertainty; he may have even, from time to time, turned his frown upside down. But he expressed all of his (and our) struggles and their potential solutions in the smartest possible ways, and never pretended that a revised mood was a settled state of affairs. He knew that living is a continual process, and that perhaps the best we can hope for is just enough therapy to make it to the next crisis.

Abandon God, and with him the foundation of anything beyond the dogma of "change", and the "best" to be hoped for is "just enough therapy to make it to the next crisis".  Somehow, daily devotions and weekly/regular Holy Communion sound rather appealing in contrast. 

The undercurrent of my life up to retirement was "getting through it in anticipation of ...". You know -- "when I graduate from college", "when I get a good job", "when I get married" ... etc, etc. Never considering that realizing that I was living in The Kingdom of God NOW! I was already "there", having died to this world in Baptism, and now haltingly taking infant steps into my eternity with Christ. 

So I'm certain this book will not eternally "save your life", and may even proffer false palliative comfort preventing you from allowing Christ to TRULY save you in this life and the next. However, it is a nice short somewhat fluffy intro to Pragmatism. 

Biden Bars, 25th Amendment

 https://babylonbee.com/news/teachers-unions-promise-school-will-resume-as-soon-as-they-are-done-campaigning-for-biden/?utm_content=bufferc48cf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer&fbclid=IwAR0EeCSOKO8CGTNhV7tEO9WsAxeRRbA9mHEYz_Ski0zZJVVYYz0XT37osUw

Why the red bars? Anybody with a moment of graphic design knows that bright red bars are going to draw the most attention. 

Some of my thoughts: 

• They wanted to use the hammer and sickle in red, but thought that might be too obvious. 
• They are making it clear that "Red America" will be put behind bars when they win. (where else would you put deplorables? 
• It makes it clear that this is really the "Bid Harris" election ... Joe isn't a factor. 
  

While I'm speculating ... 

Why is Pelosi talking 25th amendment now? 

I do like the yellow ... "or such other body of congress may by law provide". So all you really need to remove the president is a majority in the house! Cool! Welcome to the banana republic of N America. 

So what do I think? 

It's a goal line taunt.

They know the election is totally rigged in their favor and they want to show us that they can do whatever they want, so we need to get on bended knee now before we get the lash.  My hope is that Biden wins with 200 million votes compared to Trump's 65 million, and at least a few people find it strange that out of 230 million eligible voters, 265 million voted. I'm not sure of that though ... note that 244 US counties have more registered  voters than live adults, and nobody seems to care about that. 

Oh, the link at the top is just entertainment for this likely waning time when we can laugh. It is harder to laugh in the Gulag. 

VDH, The Rotting Scraps Of Civilization

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/10/the-fragments-of-a-civilization/?fbclid=IwAR2JpRg2UB7aRMJeNktS0TZqohEAAMZc1y7UNrrgeZJ3DWUKvvDiY-X36Do

The linked leads off with a recounting of what has now become brutally obvious ...

Translate all that, and the evidence grows that Hillary Clinton, in felonious fashion, paid for the Steele dossier to subvert an election and, after the election, to destroy a presidential transition and indeed a presidency itself — government efforts that historians one day will assess as the most intense effort on record to destroy a U.S. president.

As most of what VDH writes, the linked deserves at least a scan. It concludes thusly ...  

So we are in revolutionary times, even as we snooze about a recent systematic effort, hidden with great effort by our own government, to destroy a prior presidential campaign and transition, and now a presidency.

We are asked to vote for a candidate who will not reveal his position on any major issue of our age, because he feels to do so would enlighten the undeserving electorate and thereby cost him the election. So we continue to sleepwalk toward a revolution whose architects warped our institutions in 2016–2020, and they now plan to alter many of them beyond recognition in 2021.

Translated, that means that they don’t regret what they did in 2016–2019, only that they belatedly got caught for a brief time.

And so by changing the rules after 2020, they are vowing never ever to get caught again.

Democrats Fought Poverty and Poverty Won

https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/poverty-won/

Life is a struggle. Certainly it is reasonable to attempt to minimize pain, the problem is that it is hard to know when the cost of denying the inevitable reality of struggle and pain exceeds the benefits, and often even makes the situation far worse.

Amity Shlaes "The Great Society" covers this well.

The linked article covers much of Shlaes ground in a shorter format. 

The growing black middle class shared that optimistic self-help view. The 900,000 monthly buyers of Ebony magazine, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 1965, agreed with publisher John Johnson, a proudly self-made millionaire, that what defined success was raising a family, sending kids to college, and “earning an MBA or making an outstanding professional contribution.” In other words, it’s not just a matter of having Dad married to Mom but of having families capable of transmitting the virtues that enable success. That cultural reality—the shared beliefs, values, and obligations that make a family—is something social scientists, with their measures and statistics, seem unable to see.

Imagine that! A black entrepreneur millionaire and his near a million largely black readers promoting "family values"! Crazy talk. Easy to see why Democrats had to nip that in the bud!  

Trump Fought The Swamp ...

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/10/the-fundamentals-vs-the-polls.php 

I believe the fix is in. One of my sorta hopes is that Biden wins the popular vote 150 million to 60 million in a field of 120 million eligible voters (the Democrats have never been math wizzes). I'm thinking that in a country where 200 million have died of Covid, that may be suspicious to a few people, but these days, probably not that many. 

The purpose of this post is just this observation from the link. 

In the end, if President Trump loses the current election, the lesson will be that one man can’t successfully take on the entire establishment. Trump fought the press, the schools, the dominant tech companies, the Chinese and Russians and those who are in their pockets, the anti-Israel lobby, the no-borders interests, the entertainment industry, the public sector unions, the greedy “green” interests, the useless career politicians like Joe Biden. The American people benefited, but it may prove to have been too much. The president’s epitaph might be: Trump fought the Swamp, and the Swamp won.

Hooker

 https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/richard-hooker-a-forgotten-father-of-national-conservatism/

Joseph Hooker is one of  -- if not THE foundational thinkers of Western conservatism. His short life, spanning the late 1500s was just post Luther, and in the midst of the foment of the Reformation and the seminal arguments on the relationship of church and state.

Hooker wrote in the 1590s, that high tide of Elizabethan intellectual and literary culture, which defined the shape of our language and culture right down to the present. While Hooker was in London drafting his Laws, Shakespeare was on the opposite bank of the Thames writing The Taming of the Shrew (which has some interesting thematic parallels with the Laws, actually),and Spenser had just returned to Ireland after coming to London to publish and promote his Faerie Queene. Francis Bacon was a leading advisor at court, just beginning his literary career. Like these other men, the scale of Hooker’s achievement looms up out of the relative mediocrity of his predecessors with a suddenness that can baffle the historian. Stanley Archer observes, “It is no more possible to account for Hooker’s achievement than for those of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser and Bacon.”

He is particularly applicable to our time as we as Christians need to articulate "a vision of continuity amidst change" ...

To defend “the present state and legal establishment of the Church of England,” Hooker had to articulate a vision of continuity amidst change, a vision of national particularism amidst universal norms, that remains profoundly instructive and strikingly relevant today. Although Hooker’s own writings have all but “passed away as in a dream,” they offer us a basis for a profound and compelling national conservatism for our own day.

The article well states the essence of "conservatism", or what I believe to be the essence of rational thought -- walking the narrow and winding road between the netlist and the skeptic. 

He thus offers us the outlines of a conservative epistemology: that we must be modest in our judgments, and especially our prognostications about the future; that we must credit the wisdom of others as well as ourselves; that we must be relentlessly empirical, devoted students of human nature and observers of the world, ready to revise our judgments and plans when necessary. Yet for all this, conservatism refuses a flat empiricism or hollow relativism, convinced that beneath our half-baked plans lies a providential hand and that above our time-worn institutions stand transcendent realities; these provide us with purpose while warning us not to trust too much in our own purposes. Conservatism thus refuses both the certitude of the fanatic and the nihilism of the skeptic.

The Managerial Revolution, Burnham

 I'm on a bit of a Burnham tear, primarily because I believe that even though most of his specific predictions have proven wrong ( Germany defeating the USSR and winning WWII, later, the triumph of "efficient" USSR Socialism being inevitable), he correctly points out the big picture -- the rise of bureaucratic power linked with increasingly massive and powerful corporations. 

To a major extent, the world is now run by "managers" both in the government and in corporations -- to a large extent we in the "Proletariat" largely work for Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc, although the vast majority have no idea this is so. We are increasingly Orwellian "Proles", believing "Newspeak" in the form of "Fake News", and living in fear that we will say something not allowed by the elite, and be "Canceled". 

My full set of notes and comments are here. 

The managers will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production. The state—that is, the institutions which comprise the state—will, if we wish to put it that way, be the “property” of the managers. And that will be quite enough to place them in the position of ruling class.

While Burnham somewhat understands the impact of money, he seems to have significantly missed the requirement for a incentive (profit, wealth) and reality based feedback (profit/loss) in the system. The demise of the USSR and China's creation of a crony capitalist (Fascist) economy, as well as the US and Western Europe ending up with a softer version of the same, seems to have at least for the present vindicated Capitalism as the equivalent of fossil fuel for the creation of wealth. 

We have seen that its structure is based upon the state ownership and control of the major instruments of production, with the state in turn controlled by, and acting in the primary interests of, the managers. This in turn means the disappearance of capitalist private property rights vested in individuals.

Well, no ... what Burnham thought inevitable. wasn't.  

The book is well worth reading for those of us that are cultural, historical nerds. Metaphysical truth is often at least hinted at in human error!

I Am Not A Pacifist

 https://www.dailywire.com/news/why-you-should-buy-a-gun-according-to-c-s-lewis

No Christian should consider it his duty to roll over and die. “Love” is not another word for “nicety” or “passivity.” It is as fiercely aggressive as it is aggressively selfless — and sometimes, it means taking up arms.

As I observe the territory that used to be the Democratic Republic of America (amazingly, once known as the "united" states!) drift farther and farther into godless tyranny, likely rupture, and possible war, my personal inclination is to sit in "Red America" and watch it burn. I'd rather see a divorce between the states than a war. 

The phrase that keeps nagging in my brain is "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing".  A quote I choose to attribute to Burke, but one that many have claimed. I don't claim to be a "good man" -- as Christ said, in Mark 18, "Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good--except God alone." Naturally since he is God, there is some mystery there -- he is also fully man, so we will just leave it there for today. 

In this age of relativism however, "good men" is a lost concept, and "evil" is at best relative if recognized as existing at all, with the possible exception of "Whiteness".  

On top of this sad reality, the general very short attention spans of our population, and the total vacuity of our "elites", is the fact that Social Media is a shallow fetid pond that requires a shower after just dipping a toe in, let alone attempting to seed it with "pearls" -- I expect nobody to agree with my assessment of "pearls". Each of us now has the dubious "right" to consider our own views to be metaphysically "true".  

The topic of this post is my concern that too many Christians today believe that they are required to be pacifists. CS Lewis disagrees, as I believe does Christ. As he said in Luke 22 -- He said to them, "But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one".

Trump is the only evidence that "the Deplorables" are not going to just roll over and die quietly. One notices a distinct lack of violence as Christians gather (50K + in this case). My current studies are largely on the time before, during, and after the Civil War. Can a return to America happen without massive violence?  I'd argue that the America that resulted after the Civil War is a different country relative to foundational belief, it was really only "united" in territory. America was founded to be a collection of states where power was primarily with the people, then the community, then the states, and only then the Federal Government. The Civil War essentially reversed that order and it has been getting more explicit ever since. I'm not arguing the correctness of the Civil War. Certainly racially based chattel slavery was wrong, but there is a lot to argue on the METHOD of attempting to remove it, and the costs.  The discussion bears a lot of similarity to the use of the atom bomb. 

An excellent exploration of that topic is covered in "The Stakes" -- oh that millions of people could read that as a current version of "The Federalist Papers". Color me highly doubtful. While our founders deeply understood the stakes of their revolution (once "ours"), I'm certain that a culture that is unsure of how many genders there are is incapable of counting costs (or correct change for that matter). 

Lewis made this argument most forcefully in 1940, in front of a society of pacifists in a speech called “Why I Am Not a Pacifist.” He pointed out that pure nonviolence, if carried to its logical conclusion by all men of fighting age, would leave the pacifist nations defenseless and the world at the mercy of totalitarians and Nazis.

This post so far hasn't explicitly addressed the issue of defending your own body. The  commandments (in Hebrew) explicitly say thou shalt not MURDER as opposed to the common english false translation as "thou shalt not kill", causing much confusion. The real meaning in Hebrew  is clear -- thou shalt treat the issue of translation with fear and trembling! 

Historically, much of our Christian law is based on Natural Law ... in which self defence is clearly allowed. To some extent, Christ calls us to "rise above" nature, although clearly realizing that to be human is to be physically part of nature and it's laws. Yes, we have the  Holy Spirit, and we also know that we fail to follow his leadings on a regular basis. 

I think this article does a good job of covering the issue, I see the closing paragraph as a good summary. 

We recognize that this is a sensitive issue of conscience for many, and that grace and love must characterize this conversation. We also are convinced that any such self-defense must be considered as a last resort and in response to a reasonable threat. The same principle of valuing the image of God in others that drives us to protect the weak among us also compels us to a careful and measured response.

The bottom line is that when the issue comes to the fore, nobody really knows how they will react, just like a trained soldier doesn't actually know if he will kill until he does. Being armed (having a gun) is one level of decision, having a baseball bat, or being trained in self defence would be another. Depending  on your physical  characteristics,  when in extremis, your body may decide, and the result may surprise you.

We may get to the point where everyone claiming to be a Christian may have to display a cross on their home. As we saw in Germany, it may well be likely that as a first step to disarming the nation, the "authorities" will go house to house collecting weapons. Once they have them from the Christian minority (getting smaller and smaller),  it will be easier to take the rest. The knowledge that the population is heavily armed is itself a deterrent to tyranny. Even if you ARE a pacifist, having a few guns, even if they are in their original boxes with no ammo in the home, is a way to "vote for peace". 

My conclusion  is that if someone comes to my home with apparent violent intent, "official" or otherwise, it is my duty to forward  them to the eternal judge. I will also face that judge, and under Grace, even if I made the wrong choice, it will be covered by the sacrifice of Christ. Other Christians will face that same judge. If  not defending your neighbor was the wrong choice, Grace will be sufficient for that as well. 

My advice is to get a few weapons (shotgun, Armalite Rifle (NOT "assault"... that is propaganda), and a pistol that you can handle. Take a gun safety course, and learn how to use them. You may find that putting holes in paper or clay pigeons is actually quite fun. It is called "shooting, not killing  ... same for hunting/killing and fishing/catching. 

Amusing Ourselves To Death

 Postman covers a key problem of our current society right up front in the first paragraph:

"Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For Las Vegas is a city entirely devoted to the idea of entertainment, and as such proclaims the spirit of a culture in which all public discourse increasingly takes the form of entertainment. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death."

The following rather long quote gives a good summary of our specific danger -- a bias that we don't even have a clue to our peril:

"I met McLuhan thirty years ago when I was a graduate student and he an unknown English professor. I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley—that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation. I might add that my interest in this point of view was first stirred by a prophet far more formidable than McLuhan, more ancient than Plato. 

In studying the Bible as a young man, I found intimations of the idea that forms of media favor particular kinds of content and therefore are capable of taking command of a culture. I refer specifically to the Decalogue, the Second Commandment of which prohibits the Israelites from making concrete images of anything. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water beneath the earth.” I wondered then, as so many others have, as to why the God of these people would have included instructions on how they were to symbolize, or not symbolize, their experience. It is a strange injunction to include as part of an ethical system unless its author assumed a connection between forms of human communication and the quality of a culture. 

We may hazard a guess that a people who are being asked to embrace an abstract, universal deity would be rendered unfit to do so by the habit of drawing pictures or making statues or depicting their ideas in any concrete, iconographic forms. The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture."

In this day of Twitter, Facebook, 24x7 "news", etc, we are no longer on the "verge" -- the culture that Postman feared losing is long gone.

To wit, this quote:

"Because the television commercial is the single most voluminous form of public communication in our society, it was inevitable that Americans would accommodate themselves to the philosophy of television commercials. By “accommodate,” I mean that we accept them as a normal and plausible form of discourse. By “philosophy,” I mean that the television commercial has embedded in it certain assumptions about the nature of communication that run counter to those of other media, especially the printed word. 

For one thing, the commercial insists on an unprecedented brevity of expression. One may even say, instancy. A sixty-second commercial is prolix; thirty seconds is longer than most; fifteen to twenty seconds is about average. This is a brash and startling structure for communication since, as I remarked earlier, the commercial always addresses itself to the psychological needs of the viewer. Thus it is not merely therapy. It is instant therapy. Indeed, it puts forward a psychological theory of unique axioms: The commercial asks us to believe that all problems are solvable, that they are solvable fast, and that they are solvable fast through the interventions of technology, techniques and chemistry."

Would our current model for brevity be a Tweet? 

Again, our technologies have instilled a bias that any problem is quickly, easily, painlessly, and without detrimental side effects "solvable" -- which is a lie, as our alarming suicide, depression, addiction, loneliness and general "brokenness" makes clear.

Our desire however is for more of the same quick, easy, obvious, etc "solutions" -- 100% guaranteed in the real world vs the media / entertainment world, to deepen our tragedy.

"The Shallows" by Nick Carr has more current information on this topic.